A Song of Ice and Fire: The Climate Crisis Inside America’s Prisons

COMMENT 203 spent the next few days without food, water, or ventilation, breaking windows for air, carving holes in the walls to escape, and even setting fire to bed sheets and clothing as a hopeful signal to rescuers. 14 As scientists, heads of state, religious leaders, and the United Nations have all acknowledged, climate change is one of the most pressing crises of the twenty-first century. 15 Each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850. 16 In addition, the "[g]lobal surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other [fifty]-year period over at least the last [two thousand] years." 17Rising temperatures are "associated with widespread changes in weather patterns[,]" leading to more extreme weather events, such as heat waves, storms, floods, droughts, etc. 18 Yet, politicians, judges, and other institutional decisionmakers seldom consider the disproportionate effect that these climatic developments have on the prison population. 19 Indeed, scholars have 14 Id.